A self-professed “hoarder of images,” Trisha Baga is compelled by what they call “the stuff that fills the gaps.” Their work gleans the margins of the digital and the logic of online browsing to build dreamy, layered narratives. The often disparate elements in Baga’s works clump together like a mutually imbricated life form held together by a sticky, viscous goo.

This stickiness plays a central role in a new series of unique works on paper that draw on deep-space imagery, layering starscapes with views of the artist’s studio or objects from their personal sphere. Clumps of brightly coloured chewing gum sit on the surface of the images, conjuring a phantom body.

Stickiness pervades the practice more broadly. In various currents of philosophical thought, it functions as a liminal state, a nexus of relations between bodies, objects, and signs. What “sticks” to an object reveals its history: where it has been, what it has touched, what traces it has accumulated. In Baga’s practice — which often complicates high-tech imaging systems and the visual languages of scientific or institutional knowledge production — the libidinal, abject qualities of stickiness push back against the purported liquidity of the digital realm.

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